52 Week Photography Challenge - Week 3

Week 3

Technical: Full Manual

While the camera often determines shutter speed and aperture for the photographer, it doesn't know your creative intent. This week, challenge your self to assume creative control over the camera by using full manual mode. Select a subject where varying the aperture and / or shutter speed helps enhance the composition and visual qualities of the image.

Gear used that same Canon 6D with a Canon 24-70 f/2.8 II and Amazon Basics flash

Settings:

Shutter speed: 1/200 sec

Aperture: f/20

ISO: 100

Focal Length: 70mm

Okay, so this challenge is really testing my creativity and that's good! I want to try to things with my photography and to learn new skills. With that being said, I found this challenge very difficult. I only shoot in manual and I have for quite some time. I feel confident behind my camera and I know what settings to change to get a desired effect.

So for this challenge I thought about things that the auto feature would miss. My first thought was motion blur, a technique of using a slow shutter speed to, well, you guessed it, blur motion. The traffic in Berea doesn't exactly provide very much excitement. I got to thinking of other settings that auto mode controls, the answer is all of them. For this image, my camera would have chosen settings to create a properly exposed photo without taking into consideration that a flash would fire. This lighting is probably my favorite lighting technique. It's fun to do and it can create some moody photos.

I don't want to "kill" this lighting method, but I'm also considering taking on a personal portrait project that involves this lighting set up. The trick when photographing smaller subjects is to get the flash as close as possible to the subject. The flash was approximately only six inches or less away from my subject in this photo. I do want to add the disclaimer that this image HAS been Photoshopped *gasp*. Although all that was done was removing the plastic stand that holds it up as shown in the below photo.

Unedited version of the photo

I took this challenge a little further and instead of settling for simply removing the stand, I also decided to add it in a couple of space scene photos. Both of the background photos are courtesy of NASA on Unsplash (a free photography website).

Consider these your reward for making it all the way to the end of this post. ENJOY!